My son and a rock band

The “Farnival” was yesterday, and we helped out a bit. It was quite exciting to set up a display of posters and African artifacts, and then have the skies suddenly open up, and scurry around to put stuff under the tables to keep dry, then the sun, then rain, then sun… The kids didn’t mind the rain, of course, but my posters did.

Part of the entertainment included some student rock bands,and one of the bands asked my son Michael to be their lead singer, I guess you’d call it. This happened on Wednesday, so for two days he was frantically trying to learn and memorize 6 songs, which became a great excuse to not do his homework. Mikey has a great ear, so listening to the songs on Youtube over and over was the way to make that happen for him, and apparently a high volume helps this process!

Now I can hear you think, come on, you played Led Zeppelin loud in the 70s, but in fact I was that stick-in-the-mud in college who always wanted the music softer, and at my first rock concert I thought I’d go deaf. And that was Chicago, hardly rock music!

The good thing about the loud volume and repetition as Mikey learned was that I could hear that some of these songs were not appropriate for a middle school carnival. So we had an opportunity to discuss some important things that otherwise wouldn’t have come up.

One of the songs had a hateful line in it, “kill the ____” (doesn’t matter which group, does it?) and I got to explain how awful that was. Another used the F word, which is very off-limits in middle school, at least in a sanctioned setting, but we discussed the difference between using that word when you hit your thumb with a hammer – bad enough at 14 years old – and using it as an active verb to describe how you want to treat someone. He nodded his head, but seemed more impressed by my argument that if he did sing those words, he’d be visiting the principal. I did allow him to keep the word “punkass” in one song.

After all that work, and all those discussions, the rain only allowed him to sing one of those songs, which he did in his “I’m sort of a baritone now but not quite” voice. Which song? The one with punkass, of course,. one of the few words I actually understood!

2 Responses

Ah, my first rock concert was also Chicago, playing with the Beach Boys, in May 1975. Luckily, we saw them outdoors at the Oakland Coliseum baseball stadium, so ear plugs weren’t necessary. I’m a big Chicago fan and have seen them 9 or 10 times since. The best experience was hearing them in concert with Earth, Wind, and Fire at the Red Rocks amphitheater outside of Denver a few years back.